Department of State

Jerry Israel and

David L. Anderson

Upon his resignation in 1792, Henry Remsen, the first chief clerk of the
Department of State, left the following instructions:

Such of the Foreign Letters as are not filed away in the cases, are for
the present put on my desk in two pigeon holes at the right hand side.
The Consular returns are at the bottom of said desk right hand side
… the drafts of foreign proceedings … are filed in said
desk left hand pigeon hole. The letters from our ministers and
charge des affaires
now in commission Mr. Jefferson keeps…. A little attention will
be necessary inseparating the foreign from the domestic letters, as they
are sent to the Office by Mr. Jefferson to be filed. My rule in making
the separation was by reading them. The domestic letters to be filed in
the Office down stairs, the foreign letters in the Office up stairs.

Nearly two centuries later, commenting on the move from "Old
State" to headquarters in "New State" (1947) and
finally, "New, New State"(1961), the diplomat Henry Serrano
Villard wrote:

Even this fantastically outside complex is inadequate. Spilling over
into nine rented buildings, using nearly 1.5 million square feet of
space, the State Department premises are already too small; if AID
[Agency for International Development], ACDA [Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency] and USIA [United States Information Agency] are
added, the total is twenty buildings with 2,547,377 square feet. Offices
are overcrowded, tenants must double up, conference rooms must be lopped
off, new outlets sought.

The irony of these comparisons of simple and complex styles is that
Villard's larger department was if anything less rather than more
involved in the making of American foreign policy, the State
Department's primary responsibility. Along these lines, in modern
times, especially since World War II, one notes the competitive foreign
policies of departments such as Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Labor,
Treasury, Interior, and Health and Human Services, plus the role of the
Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Reserve Bank, not to mention
semiofficial business, scientific, cultural, and journalistic groups. By
the mid-1960s, only one-fourth of federal personnel in U.S. embassies were
employees of the State Department. In addition, there is the superior and
sometimes competitive power of the president and groups or individuals on
the White House staff and otherwise outside the State Department that the
president may especially empower.

Henry A. Kissinger noted the paradox of an increasingly specialized,
bureaucratized society having negative consequences for American policy
and policymakers. Calling for a return to the individual and intellectual
approach to problems and policy, not uncharacteristic of the formative age
of Jefferson and Remsen, Kissinger writes of policy "fragmented
into a series of ad hoc decisions which make it difficult to achieve a
sense of direction or even to profit from experience. Substantive problems
are transformed into administrative ones. Innovation is subjected to
'objective' tests which deprive it of spontaneity.
'Policy planning' becomes the projection of familiar
problems into the future. Momentum is confused with purpose. There is
greater concern with how things are than with which things matter."
As Richard Nixon's national security adviser and then as secretary
of state, Kissinger waged his own assault against the inertia of
bureaucratized foreign policy.

Borrowing from the example of Remsen and the explanation of Kissinger, it
is possible to observe—at least until the mid-twentieth
century—that amidst efforts to institutionalize the apparatus of
the State Department, what machinery there was rested on a precious few
long-lived cogwheels. Working backward not quite all the way from
Kissinger to Remsen, one traces a remarkable continuity within the careers
of just three men: Wilbur J. Carr, with forty-five years of service
(1892–1937); Alvey A. Adee, with forty-six
years in Washington (1878–1924) and seven before that for the
Department of State in Madrid; and William Hunter, with fifty-seven years
(1829–1886) as chief of bureau, chief clerk, and second assistant
secretary (the latter two being key administrative posts held also by Carr
and Adee).

As late as 1929, the Department of State was small and its central
leadership even more scant. When Henry L. Stimson took office as Herbert
C. Hoover's secretary of state, there were—including
everybody from the secretary to chauffeurs, clerks, stenographers, and
janitors—six hundred people. Yet Stimson, not unusually for the
department, surrounded himself with an able, tight-knit group of
assistants including Carr, Joseph Cotton, Francis White, and Nelson T.
Johnson. Like Cotton, some assistants were new to foreign policy; others,
like Carr and Johnson, had seen extended service in the consular and
diplomatic corps. They blended together, however, to advise the secretary
and the president on critical policy matters in Latin America, Europe, and
Asia.

The history of the State Department until the mid-twentieth century was
tied, it appears, to the history of the few men who had served as
secretary of state or to their staffs. The role of the individual has
since, however, become increasingly institutionalized, and with that
change has come a State Department larger and yet often less effective
than it was in its humbler days.

DeConde, Alexander.
The American Secretary of State.
New York, 1962. Contains useful analyses.

Elder, Robert E.
The Policy Machine: The Department of State and American Foreign
Policy.
Syracuse, N.Y., 1960. A landmark political science study.

Graebner, Norman A., ed.
An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth
Century.
New York, 1961. One of the most used sources for general, interpretive
information.

Hartmann, Frederick H., and Robert L. Wendzel.
America's Foreign Policy in a Changing World.
New York, 1994. Describes how policy is made in Washington, D.C.

Heinrichs, Waldo.
American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United
States Diplomatic Tradition.
Boston, 1966. Besides being a biography of an important man, it traces
the evolution of foreign policy implementation.

Ilchman, Frederick.
Professional Diplomacy in the United States, 1779–1939.
Chicago, 1961. A careful and documented study.

McCamy, James.
Conduct of the New Diplomacy.
New York, 1964. A revision of the author's previous volume,
The Administration of American Foreign Affairs
(New York, 1950), based on the intervening decade.

Morison, Elting E.
Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L.
Stimson.
Boston, 1960.